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Andrew Wyeth— Her Room

March 29, 2013 - February 23, 2014

Wyeth Study Center Gallery

This exhibition features the Andrew Wyeth tempera painting Her Room (1963) as a part of the museum’s 65th anniversary celebration highlighting its own collection of American art. The tempera is accompanied by a selection of pencil and watercolor studies from the Wyeth family collection that led to the final work, offering an opportunity to see how the artist developed his ideas for the painting. His working process is evident in several of the drawings, which include color and light notations, and sometimes even footprints, as the artist would occasionally spread the studies on the floor of the studio around him to inform him as he was working on the tempera.

The Farnsworth Art Museum made national news by purchasing Her Room, the first Andrew Wyeth tempera added to the collection. The purchase made national headlines, with articles in The New York Times and the Boston Globe because, as the Times noted, its $65,000 purchase price was “the highest price ever paid by a museum for a work of a living artist.” The article also remarked that Wyeth described Her Room as a “picture of the aloneness of a New England home,” inspired the previous spring when he “looked into the front room and was struck by the odd dark and light aspects upon the water and the aloneness of the scene.”